The rules of the Senate are an important storehouse of a great deliberative tradition, and they should not be lightly changed. But neither should they be wielded to exercise a power that the Senate doesn’t even need to possess and doesn’t currently use for any serious purpose aside from pointless delay.

Majority Leader John Thune is backing a plan to change the Senate’s rules for confirming executive branch nominees in order to allow for bloc voting on groups of nominees rather than time-consuming individual votes that permit the minority party to delay confirmations by a grinding war of attrition. The plan is a sound one, so long as its scope is appropriately limited to subordinate officials within the executive branch whose confirmations are required by statute rather than by the Constitution.

The Senate’s confirmation power is one of the most important responsibilities given to the upper chamber in the Constitution. Starting with Harry Reid’s use of the “nuclear option” to change the rules for appellate court nominees on a party-line basis in 2013, the filibuster has been gradually eliminated as a tool for the minority to block confirmations or judicial and executive branch nominees. That leaves two weapons for the minority. One is simply to refuse unanimous consent and force a laborious one-by-one floor process for each nominee. The other is the “blue slip,” by which senators are allowed to block a vote on nominees to be district judges or U.S. attorneys in their own state.

Thune isn’t proposing to eliminate the blue slip, which has many supporters in both parties. Nor, wisely, is he tampering with the legislative filibuster. But the refusal of unanimous consent has escalated in recent administrations and become routine this year, stranding hundreds of nominees. Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has tried to use those delays as leverage to extract concessions on unrelated fronts where Democrats lack votes (a tactic they denounced when Tommy Tuberville tried it during the Biden years), and Thune and the White House have prudently refused. Thune could try to break the roadblock with all-night sessions, but that inevitably wears out the patience of his caucus. A fairer and more sensible solution is to change the rules — but doing so means that Republicans will have fewer weapons when the shoe is on the other foot down the road. That’s all the more reason to cabin the changes with care.

A third possibility would have been to allow Donald Trump to make scores of recess appointments. But this is a stopgap that only fills the jobs until the midterms — after which Republicans might have a smaller majority or be in the minority. Moreover, as we stressed repeatedly when it was floated beginning after the election, Trump’s stated desire to have the Senate recess itself so it would not vote on his cabinet was a terrible deformation of a key check on executive overreach. Reid learned, to his great regret, the dangers of tampering with the Senate’s powers; Thune should not make the same mistake.

The danger of bloc votes on nominees is that leadership will use packages in the same way they use omnibus spending bills: to pressure members of their caucus to accept bad nominees by attaching them to ones who need to be confirmed. That’s why the rule change should be carefully limited, and not applied to cabinet-level officials, judges, U.S. attorneys, or ambassadors — the categories of senior officers for whom Senate confirmation is required by Article II. (While there is little immediate harm in bloc-confirming minor ambassadorships, it is hard to see how a rule change could distinguish those from major ones.) The better long-term path would be to eliminate Senate confirmation entirely for subordinates within the executive departments. Far too many of these jobs go through confirmations that are a poor use of the Senate’s time simply to install people who carry out the directions of Senate-confirmed department heads. Voting them through in blocs simply makes explicit where this process should end: by allowing the president and the department heads to fill those jobs directly while focusing the Senate’s role on major executive branch jobs and life-tenured judges.